This first day of the semester at Lee Gallery marked more than the return of classes; it introduced “Bless Your Heart,” a layered and dynamic exhibition by South Carolinian artist Adrian Rhodes that invites viewers to explore the intricacies of thought and emotion.
“Bless Your Heart” is not a snapshot representative of a singular moment in time, but an accumulation of work developed over several years. Pieces created as early as 2019 appear alongside previously unseen works, reinforcing the exhibition’s emphasis on continuity rather than completion. Rhodes says the exhibition represents “an ongoing body of work that’s all interrelated.”
“I don’t really work linear, piece-by-piece,” Rhodes said in an interview with The Tiger. “I work 10 to 12 pieces at a time across different mediums.”
This process is central to the exhibition’s functioning. Different mediums — paintings, prints and sculptures — all develop together, embedding conversation and repetition into the exhibition’s structure. Questions raised in one medium are answered in another, encouraging engagement as paintings, prints and sculptures respond to and inform one another.
“If you’re in the gallery, you’ll see repetition of the motif, you’ll see repetition of iconography,” Rhodes said. “You’ll see elements that jump from media to media.”
Plate patterns recur in paintings, sculptural forms take after drawn imagery and familiar symbols resurface across reimagined contexts.
The earliest piece in the show is “The Words Caught in the Back of My Throat,” a large acrylic on canvas with cotton cord and upholstery needle, which exemplifies this approach. Rhodes shared that although this piece was completed years ago, its imagery and iconography were developed far before and continue to resonate throughout the work on display.
At the physical and conceptual center of “Bless Your Heart” is an installation created by pulling Lee Gallery’s moveable walls into a small, enclosed room. Inspired by a residency Rhodes completed last summer, exploring domestic space, the design functions as both an interior reflection of a mental space and a literal architectural interior.
That interior space is the one “you’re kind of always at,” Rhodes shared. She described the surrounding works as the things that are swirling about outside of it. In this way, moving through the gallery serves as an act of navigating a mind, exploring memory, repetition and emotional inheritance.
Repetition serves as both a metaphor and a strategy throughout the exhibition. Having such defined iconography allows her freedom across media and iterations while holding everything together as a unified body of work, even when the media are “very, very different.” Revisiting the same imagery and themes across different forms and media allows Rhodes to explore the persistence of the past.
The themes seen across the exhibition also extend into core ideas of inheritance, acknowledging the weight of generational experience without attempting to neatly resolve it. Instead, “Bless Your Heart” takes on emotions of grief, joy and contradictions, allowing these emotions to coexist.
Rhodes noted that part of this is resisting cultural platitudes that attempt to smooth over the pain and emotions that we experience.
“Our culture gives us a lot of platitudes whenever something bad happens,” she said. “When things are complicated or things are messy, we tend to say things like ‘When the door closes, the window opens,’ and ‘There’s always a silver lining’ … but sometimes that just feels kind of hollow.”
This exhibition instead introduces the idea that not everything is immediately understandable, and it is okay to not be okay.
The exhibition’s title itself, “Bless Your Heart,” embodies this ambiguity. Rhodes, a lifelong South Carolinian, is aware of its cultural contradictions, conveying at times empathy, sincerity, anger or judgment. For Rhodes, all reactions, meanings and interpretations are applicable to the work.
“It’s like looking back on your past self with empathy, with grace, with frustration, with anger and all the different ways that you can feel and respond to the things that have happened to you along the way,” Rhodes shared.
“Bless Your Heart” invites viewers to reflect on their own personal experiences, allowing the art to become a vessel for shared experiences and truths. Viewers can expect to recognize themselves within the work and acknowledge their connection to the emotions explored within. The exhibition does not demand answers, but instead offers permission to honor the complexity of unresolved emotion.
An artist talk is scheduled on Feb. 5 from 5-7 p.m. at Lee Gallery for those interested in learning more about Rhodes’ process and themes. Until then, experience “Bless Your Heart” for yourself by visiting Lee Gallery until Feb. 26, Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
